Four monarchies

The four kingdoms of Daniel are four kingdoms which, according to the Book of Daniel, precede the "end-time" and the "Kingdom of God".

The Book of Daniel originated from a collection of legends circulating in the Jewish community in Babylon and Mesopotamia in the Persian and early Hellenistic periods (5th to 3rd centuries BC), and was later expanded by the visions of chapters 7-12 in the Maccabean era (mid-2nd century).

The "four kingdoms" theme appears explicitly in Daniel 2 and Daniel 7, and is implicit in the imagery of Daniel 8. Daniel's concept of four successive world empires is drawn from Greek theories of mythological history; The symbolism of four metals in the statue in chapter 2 is drawn from Persian writings, while the four "beasts from the sea" in chapter 7 reflect Hosea 13:7–8, in which God threatens that he will be to Israel like a lion, a leopard, a bear or a wild beast. The consensus among scholars is that the four beasts of chapter 7, like the metals of chapter 2, symbolise Babylon, Media, Persia and the Seleucid Greeks, with Antiochus IV as the "small horn" that uproots three others (Antiochus usurped the rights of several other claimants to become king).

In chapter 2, Nebuchadnezzar dreams of a statue made of four different materials, identified as four kingdoms:

In chapter 7, Daniel has a vision of four beasts coming up out of the sea, and is told that they represent four kingdoms:

In chapter 8 Daniel sees a ram with two horns destroyed by a he-goat with a single horn; the horn breaks and four horns appear, followed once again by the "little horn."

From the time of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, the "four monarchies" model became widely used by all for universal history, in parallel with eschatology, among Protestants. Some continued to defend its use in universal history in the early 18th century.

Christopher Cellarius (1638–1707), based on the distinctive nature of medieval Latin. The modern historicist interpretations and eschatological views of the Book of Daniel with the Book of Revelation closely resemble and continue earlier historical Protestant interpretations.

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